We’re circling back. Going to make a couple more stops, then God willing, back home on Friday. Today I drove across South Dakota once again – but through the northern part of the state, west to east this time. I’d thought about a few different stops along the way, but finally just decided to forge on and do the Big Thing we’d been thinking about the whole time, which was the Omaha Zoo.

*Cue elderly mother doing one more speech on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and the old days of four channels and one nature show*

It’s said to be one of the top zoos in the country – second after San Diego, for some who rate such things. We got there mid-afternoon, and since most of the zoo closes at five, with the enclosed buildings remaining open until 6, we hit the outdoor exhibits first and saved the buildings for last.

What did we know? It made sense at the time. But honestly? We probably could have skipped most of the outdoor exhibits and headed straight to the buildings. It being late afternoon, most of the outdoor animals were sleeping, mostly hidden, and there really wasn’t much we hadn’t seen before. At this point I was thinking, Not so sure about these high ratings…

But then we got the desert building. And then the rainforest. Both were fabulous and well worth the price of admission. Well-designed, interesting, and with several animals we’d never seen before. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to the aquarium, which I’m thinking is probably just as good.

(The gorilla exhibit was fine – but the best of those I’ve seen was at the Atlanta Zoo, by far. Best chimps? Knoxville. They had orangutans in Omaha with a decent habitat, but orangutans in captivity always seem so depressed to me – it depresses me.)

Anyway, we spent as much time as we could in these buildings, but the story really is the bats.

We rushed to the rainforest building, noted a sign telling us there would be a “high level of bat activity,” thought it meant that the bats would be flying around a lot in their enclosure, so sure, fine, when whoosh! right by our heads. A bat. Followed by another and another – and we looked up – and there they were – everywhere. Clinging to the walls right beside us, swirling about, sweeping through the passageways – astonishing. I suppose they are “out” all the time, but of course, sleep all day – and we arrived at 5:30, just as they were awakening and starting to feast. It was fascinating – a bit daunting, but I trust the zoo to not be unleashing any danger on my head, so I was fine – I can imagine, though, someone being really terrified by this, and maybe even in these lawsuit-happy-days – moved to action. Which is why we were…surprised at the vagueness of the “warning” contrasted with the quite intense activity of the bats all around us. At one point we went to the lower level to walk on the “trail” on the “rainforest” floor. There was a woman sitting on a bench outside. She swept her hand over her hair, scowled and said, “I hope you like bats.”

This, to many, will probably be to oddest aspect of this trip report. The oddest and the most indulgent. I won’t say “self-indulgent” because it wasn’t me who was being indulged. But indulgent, nonetheless.

Of course, everything else about this trip was indulgent, anyway. Freely admitted. A few months back, someone posted a link to one of my travel posts on Facebook, and discussion ensued along the lines of “Gee, must be nice” and so on. I didn’t get defensive, because I am past that. I’m more at the stage of “You guys post gushing posts about your best-friend- hubbies and great marriages and your wonderful parents every single freaking day and all of my people in those particular categories are completely dead, so maybe you can handle posts about Spain and trying, in some feeble, undoubtedly misguided way, to fill in…gaps.”

So yeah. When you’re raising boys with a dead father, and all the family news around you is about people dying or being plunged into dementia, you’re like, “What the hell. You like all this Spaghetti Western Stuff? Screw it. Let’s do this.”

For some reason, a couple of years ago, Son #5 became entranced with the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone opus. I really and truly do not know how it happened – if it was the movies or the music that grabbed him first. All I know is that he watched them, and then the soundtracks became a fixture in our home. They came on every time I got in the car. They were on the top of the queue of Spotify when I was cooking dinner. They were learned and played on the piano – constantly.

I’d never watched any of them. Never. But I just endured it and supported it and what have you. And then last summer, the local vintage artsy heritage downtown movie palace offered The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as part of their summer series, and so I took Son #5 –

– and was enraptured.

Okay, not with the lengthy, discursive Civil War section that culminates in the bridge explosion – that could be cut – but with almost everything else, especially the music.

I got it.

People sometimes wonder – why should I have kids?

Well, here’s Reason #428. Because whenever you invite other people into your life – and that’s what having kids is all about – your own world expands. It could be something essential, or it could be something trivial. You learn something, you see more, you step out, you move down the road – and it’s all just very, very interesting.

So, let’s go back to this trip. I didn’t design it around spaghetti westerns – if I had, the trip would have looked much different (for all of those movies were filmed in Spain, and there’s even an attraction in southern Spain centered on it). I settled on Seville as a base and then, for that last week, a possible jaunt up north, ending in Bilbao.

And then a few weeks before we left, I was doing some research – unrelated to this trip. I was thinking about M’s and mine future roadschooling future, and poking around, trying to see if there were any interesting concerts coming up to which we could travel. I was thinking, first, of the Michael Giacchino “We Have to Go Back” Lost concerts, and then I idly thought (maybe because of similar-sounding Italian names)…hmmmm…what about Morricone?

*Checks RyanAir fares from Madrid to Pisa. Cheap. Struggles with guilt. Thinks – well, we’d be paying for housing *somewhere* – why not in Italy, instead of Spain for a couple of nights?*

Thinks – as per usual – about death and mortality – and pushes – BUY.

So there’s your backstory, people. Your backstory as to how we went to Ennio Morricone’s supposed last concert on Saturday, June 29 in Lucca, Italy – and then a couple of days later, were wandering around the Sad Hill Cemetery – the famed round cemetery from the final scene The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

A word about the journey to the cemetery – if you go (and you might well have arrived at this post because that’s where you’re headed) – do not go through Santo Domingo de Silos. It’s what we did, and it was a mistake – I mean, the car survived, but it was dicey – a super steep hilly, incredibly rocky path. The other way – that comes from the north ( the way we exited) – is much safer for your vehicle.

The concert was great. Thousands of people, enraptured with the music, the fantastic, theatrical sopranos giving their super-dramatic all on pieces like The Ecstasy of Gold – just Italians loving other Italians doing music. The best.

I will say that the bright spot about the rather frightening drive up a very steep hill on rocky paths in a rental car was…this view. Which we would have missed coming the other way. So – there’s that. And no damage to the car anyway, so it’s all good!

Yes, there was much re-creation of the scene. Running, seeking, fake digging, falling into graves and such. I might post some of that on Instagram in a bit. We weren’t alone. When we arrived there were three middle-aged British guys who’d arrived on motorcycles. They left, and we were alone for a good bit, and as we were living, two other small groups came. Plus, you know….

…cows.

Which is not something I expected! The ground was covered with cow patties, and as we ventured further in, we saw the reason, just up the hill, behind the trees, we heard them – the cowbells, gently sounding. As the minutes wore on, the cows moved closer, past the trees, until they had started, apparently, their late-day claim among the “graves.”

I have one more strange aspect to this whole tale. I purchased the concert tickets via a resale outfit. The way it works is that you still see the original purchaser’s names on the receipt.

I did a double take at the name. The address was given as well. It sort of checked out. This person is originally from Edmonton, Alberta, although his present professional position is elsewhere in Canada.

So. Do you think it’s possible that my weird tickets to go, on a whim, see an elderly, legendary composer in Lucca, Italy, were purchased from the Jordan Peterson?

Cod in Bilbao, Octopus in an Aldi in Madrid, a popcorn machine in Seville that fascinated.

(And a little bit in Italy)

We ate well in Spain, although it wasn’t a continual feast and it was never high-end. For the Seville part, there were six of us ranging in age from five to fifty-eight, of various dispositions, tastes and toleration levels. No, we had no pressing need to set out as a group to eat together for every meal (and in fact various divisions of the party would be off doing their own thing at times), but still, there were many factors to take into consideration which could be challenging at times. But knowing this, the smart person has already lowered expectations, and is happy to take whatever comes.

That’s not a bad suggestion for life in general, I think. Lower your expectations and be grateful for the gift of every moment. Yup.

Two other points:

First, my previous experience in Spain – Madrid and Barcelona on two different trips – had led me to expect more of the same regarding dinner times on this trip. It had been particularly acute in Barcelona, and perhaps I felt it particularly acutely at the time because I was traveling with a teen-age girl, an eight- year old and a four year old by myself. That is: they (Barcelona people – not my people) don’t even start thinking about dinner until 9pm, and then, they really are just thinking about it. We’d set out at nine, confident that we’d find a restaurant where we wouldn’t look like fools, as the sole customers – and were confounded every time.

So that’s what I was expecting in Seville. I was ready!

No need. Yes, “dinner” might not get rolling until that late hour, but the impact of the tapas culture is such that you can find people eating much of the afternoon and into the early evening.

Now, many restaurants are closed for a chunk of that – they might have been open for lunch from, say, noon to three or four – then they close and re-open at 8. But usually there are enough tapas bars that are open during that late afternoon-early evening hour that you can find something – and Spanish tapas is more than crackers and cheese. For light eaters, it qualifies as a meal.

So the point is that we never had trouble finding food being served somewhere.

Secondly, while I enjoyed the food and by no means exhausted the local cuisine, I’ll say this about traveling to an area with a deeply-rooted traditional cuisine.

We look forward to it, right? We can’t wait to hit the pizza and pasta in Italy, the German sausages, the French sauces, the Spanish ham and potatos bravas.

Well…

When I was in Italy (for two! days!), I was in the laundromat around the corner from our apartment. An American couple of about my age were also sorting and folding, so we got to talking. They were from Virginia and, like us, were on the tail end of a few weeks in Europe. I gathered that they’d been abroad a bit longer – more like four weeks. We had the usual conversation about how it had been great but we were ready to get home, and the woman said, I am so tired of pasta!

And there you go. When an American travels to a part of the world with deep cultural traditions, we encounter a different world that is very attractive in some ways – in its richness and stability, its self-confidence. But, again, an American just might find some challenges in that landscape as well – I’ll talk more about this in a general way later, but since this is a food post, I’ll limit it to food.

What that stable, deep and rich culture means for food, in my limited experience, is that you encounter wonderful food that’s been centuries in the making, beloved, well-honed – and…not much else. So in Seville and around, the menus of most restaurants tend to share about 75% of the dishes in common: pork-related products (ham, of course, and also pork loin and chops), patatas bravas, revueltos (egg and vegetable scramble), snails (in season right now), and maybe ten other common dishes.

Restaurants doing anything different are scattered. We found one chicken-centered place not far from our apartment (there’s hardly any chicken on restaurant menus), and it was good, but most times we passed by, it was almost empty, as well.

Burger places are popular, though, and not just McDonald’s. There are several chains that do well – one we encountered often and ate at twice, I think, is called The Good Burger.

It’s not just so tired of pasta! It’s the beauty and the gift of the authentic diversity we have in this country – with Mexican, Thai, Ethiopian, Nashville hot chicken, pizza and biscuits-and-gravy all within a couple miles of my house. A balanced world requires both – it requires the rich, solid, very-reluctantly changing and protected traditions – and the wildness of change and diversity. The trick is figuring out how to balance them, right?

Oh, and cost. You can eat very, very cheaply in Spain – in our experience. As I said, we didn’t go high end. So, for example, a tapas-centered dinner that filled all six of us up (including one five-year old, yes), including drinks – which included a couple/three beers – came, on one memorable occasion, to 43 Euros. Most tapas plates are between 2-3.5 Euros. Of course you can get larger plates, but we tended to stick with tapas-sized.

Anyway. Highlights of food, in no particular order:

Spinach and chickpeas in Seville (very common); tuna & peppers (again, tipico) and some sort of potato-shrimp-chorizo thing in Seville (it was excellent); Asparagus and Migas in Trujillo – Migas – breadcrumbs, sausage, peppers and egg- a typical dish of the region. Then, snails in Seville. They were in season, and everywhere – and very good. The sauce was a rich tomato – more flavorful than most sauces I encountered in Spain.

Oh, that’s my advice for you if you travel to Spain to eat and have a typical American palate like mine: bring salt. Just a bit, to bring out those flavors a little more.

Asparagus is one of the more common green vegetables in the region. It’s so arid, they just don’t grow much, and they don’t really feature on the menus. Breakfast juice with strawberries. That weird, but tasty “zucchini tart” from Seville, and one of the typical pastries of Trujillo – basically, a custard.

Clockwise from top left: First two photos are from an excellent lunch in Merida. Tuna and peppers for me, delicious pork loin and chicken for the guys. . A typical breakfast in Caceras – toast (thick-cut bread) with ham and some olive oil. A typical pastry from Guadalupe – basically day-old cake bits bound with honey Then a break in Toledo with Middle Eastern food.

Same. Pizza in Lucca – the best, served as they do in Rome, with big sheets of it available for your choosing, sold by weight. Then a very good chain burger place in Seville called Goiko Grill – probably the most expensive meal we had, but they said the burgers were great, so it was worth it. Lamb brains from on of the Seville markets. Tapas that came with drinks in Toledo. Typical bakery in Chinchon. The beginning of pintxos in Bilbao.

In the south you have tapas – served generally from a menu. In the north, you have pinxtos – piled up high at the bar. If forced to choose, I would probably go with the pintxos – the olive/pickles orientation is more my style. The other feature of pintxos is slices of bread with…stuff piled on top. I thought I had photos, but I don’t. It’s easy to find them, though.

We ate more than this, but a lot of my photos of those meals tend to have family members’ faces in them, and while many social media types have no problem using their families in that way, well, you won’t find that here.

One more: a tale of two montadillos.

There are different kinds of sandwiches in Spain, of course. The smaller is called the montadito. There’s a very popular chain called 100 Montaditos – and that’s exactly what it is. A menu featuring 100 kinds of montaditos priced at 1 Euro each.

It’s truly fast food – I would say hangover food, really. One of our party was fascinated with the concept and wanted to hit it every time we saw one (we didn’t.). I mean – for a euro? It was fine. Hit the spot.

But.

These on the right were better. Recommended in many guides, this bar – Bodequita Antonio Romero – specializes in montaditos, and they were wonderful. I think not too much more than a Euro, but easily five times as flavorful. It’s the kind of thing you really wonder about – why can’t we have this here? Just go up to a bar, order a couple of little sandwiches, have a beer, and move on. Everyone’s professional and courteous, but there’s no need to treat the experience as if you are binding yourself to the establishment for life or need to be assured that you’re loved and appreciated.

(Two reasons, probably – it goes back to the deeply rooted cultural aspect of this food and these places – they’re just part of the fabric – and the no-tipping culture, as well. I found the waitstaffs in Spain to be sometimes on the brink of brusque, but always just…professional. As a person who will go an extra mile for self-checkout and who wants to Death Stare the next server who cheerily asks, How’s it goin’ guys? Having a good day? …this is definitely more my style.)

Back from Spain, still recovering – as in, my body’s still on Europe time, awakening at about 4-5 am every morning. Which is a good thing! Every time this happens, I think, “This is definitely a lifestyle I should embrace.” And then a week later, there I am back in the old cycle of finally hitting the sack at about 1 am.

Because I’m lazy and unimaginative and have another writing assignment due today (Friday), I’m going to take the super easy way out of this and post information about where we stayed in Spain and why. This is part of how I begin to systematically blog the trip.

My 2020 devotional will be available soon. All sites say “July,” although I don’t know exactly what that means. The entries begin with the First Sunday of Advent 2019 and continue through December 31, 2020. It would be great as a gift for staff members of your parish or school – I’d be grateful if you considered it! For bulk purchase information, contact Loyola.

The only thing I regret about going to Spain at this point in time is that because of the trip, I missed the Eucharistic Congress held in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Diocese of Birmingham. It was, by all accounts, a wonderful event, the climax of which was a Eucharistic procession through the streets of the city, thousands of participants strong. Thousands! In Birmingham, Alabama!

Now for some more practicalities of the trip to Spain: where we stayed.

First was the big chunk – two weeks – in Seville. I’d be hosting my son, his wife and son, so we needed a place big enough for all of us – and I found it!

I rented this via Homeaway/VRBO. You can read my review on the site. And while I really understand and even in some ways sympathize with views against the mass-marketing of vacation rentals through this agency and especially AirBnB (more on that at the end of this post), I mean – what can you say? Four bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths for less than I’d pay for a chain hotel room in Birmingham, Alabama.

And having a washing machine meant that we, at least, could travel with one very small suitcase apiece.

(No dryer – dryers are not common in southern Europe. The apartment had a clothesline reachable from the kitchen window, hanging over a courtyard.)

This is part of the Corpus Christi procession in Caceres, but the building in the middle on the corner, between the two restaurants, is our hotel. The family room was basically in the attic – the only window was in the roof. But it was fine!

Guadalupe: This lovely little hotel. This was perhaps my favorite of the hotels, and not just because they welcome you with a small bottle of wine. It was tidy and neat, with a sweet balcony – just the kind of place I’d stay in all the time if I were traveling by myself, and perhaps with just one other kid. It was so inexpensive – E30/night for a double room – that I was able to get two rooms.

First things first;view from the balcony; view of the balcony from the street to the rear of the hotel.

–5 —

For Toledo, we went corporate with an AC/Marriott hotel. Here’s the reason – parking. Not being familiar at all with Toledo, and knowing only “Medieval city on a hill painted by El Greco,” I couldn’t imagine that I’d be able to find a hotel with parking in the city itself, and had no concept of the geography of parking garages. This Marriott sits about a kilometer away from the city – it’s not a bad walk at all – except, as I keep telling you, in 100-degree heat. Fortunately, it’s right on a bus line as well, a bus that shot right into the city and ended up at the main plaza.

In retrospect, and having walked around the city and observed the layout – I’d make a different decision about that today. I wouldn’t be afraid to take a car into the city, if a hotel indicated it had parking.

Anyway, the hotel was fine – a good breakfast, although the boys’ hopes of a waffle-maker, since you know, it’s an American chain – were not met. It was the typical Spanish breakfast with pastries, thick-cut bread for toast, cold cuts, cheese, cereals, yogurt, fruit and tortilla – a Spanish tortilla, remember, is a potato-and-egg baked concoction.

Hotels in Spain do provide butter, but in cafes – at least in southern and central Spain – one puts olive oil, not butter, on toast. Cafes and bakeries that serve breakfast provide bottles of olive oil on the counter and on tables for breakfast toast. If you think about it, it makes sense. Butter wouldn’t be something that had developed in traditional cuisine in a climate like this.

— 6 —

Over in Lucca, we went with AirBnB. There were no hotel rooms available by the time I got to planning this part of the trip which was, I hasten to add, not last minute. I mean – six weeks? That’s not at all last minute in my book. There weren’t even many apartments available – the Lucca Music Festival was going on, with a Friday concert by a 90’s band called Take That, which I might have heard of? Probably not. But a lot of women in their mid-30’s were there for it. And then Saturday night, the reason for our jump over, was the supposedly (as advertised) “Last Concert” of Ennio Morricone – the great film score composer. I’ll write more on it later, but just know that I have a musician son who’s a yuge fan of the Leone Spaghetti Westerns and has Morricone’s scores on repeat, constantly. (Morricone wrote hundreds of other scores, including for The Mission.)

So, yeah – no hotel rooms in a probably already tight market. I am honestly trying to avoid using AirBnB – I don’t like their Wokeness and while I had a good experience with them last year during the Japan trip and their response to the sudden changes in Japanese law, I don’t really trust them and am suspicious of the business model. But – well, you know? Here I was, so off to the AirBnB site I went.

I rented this apartment – which was in a great location (probably everywhere in Lucca is a great location) and run by very nice people. The only problem was it was SO HOT, even though I could tell the apartment was probably usually very comfortable with its thick stone walls – this heat was too much for it. We didn’t spend tons of time there, and we did what we could to keep it cool, but late Friday afternoon, we were walking by a store, saw a small box fan for sale in the window – and welp – the apartment owners now have a fan for the next guests. No regrets. J said that night was the best sleep he’d had the whole trip.

— 7 —

And Bilbao? Also corporate – a Holiday Inn Express. It was five minutes from the airport where I’d be returning the car and flying out of. It worked out great – the night crew at reception was composed of two lovely young women who both accepted new guests and tended bar.

And when you can get a glass of good local wine for E1.80?

You’ve got my vote….for…something.

***

I don’t know where I ultimately come down on the hotel v. vacation rental issue. I absolutely see how the latter has been exploited. It’s no longer just you renting out your dead parents’ charming apartment in the city while you come in from your more modern suburban digs to give the key to the tourists and tell them about your favorite restaurants. It’s people buying up blocks of apartments – and whole buildings – and turning them into what amount to hotels without having to pay the same taxes and meet the same regulations as hoteliers. We stayed in an apartment in Barcelona ten years ago, well before AirBnB exploded, but I could already see it happening then. We stayed in a fantastic art nouveau apartment there, but as I recall from the listing, essentially the whole building was rented out as vacation stays. What happens to neighborhoods and communities at that point?

Also, if I lived in an apartment in close proximity to a bunch of now-vacation rentals, I don’t know how I’d feel about that. Probably…not happy.

The central area of Seville is quite, quite walkable. Hardly anything more than a kilometer away – it would have been like nothing if it hadn’t been near or at a hundred degrees most days. We did the bus twice – the first time when we took our grandson/nephew down to the Aquarium from our apartment. Walking a mile and a half is fine, but not a great way to start the day with a five-year old if you would like to maintain his enthusiasm. Buses are much better for that. The second time involved the bullfight museum and the Basilica of La Macarena – Seville’s most revered image of the Virgin. I got the bright idea of going to the bullfight museum…but then we couldn’t get tickets for anytime earlier than 90 minutes from that moment. So I went ahead and got the tickets, and then got the next bright idea – that we’d go visit the Basilica – we had just enough time to do it, and All the Information told me it would be re-opening soon – at 4:30. It was just a little far to walk in that time, so sure – bus.

Well, we missed the bus the first time – we were standing in the shade a bit away, it swung by, paused….and left, with us running after it. Too bad! So we waited a few minutes until the next one came, took the bus up to the Basilica…and found that it actually didn’t re-open until five. Ah. By that point, I didn’t feel like walking back to the bus stop and waiting, so I just hailed a taxi to take us back – it was about 1 Euro more than the bus would have been for all of us.

The buses in Seville were – in my limited experience – prompt and clean. Very prompFare was $1.40, payable in cash, change actually given, which sort of shocked me.

Train to Cordoba was fine, although Spanish trains seem far more expensive than trains in at least Italy and France. Yes, they do offer discounts when you book in advance, and I’m sure Spanish residents use all sorts of plans and cards to get better deals, but still – I’ll just compare it to our brief stint in Italy. The train between Pisa and Lucca – about a 30 minute ride – was E 3.60, last minute, purchased before boarding. The train between Seville and Cordoba – longer, yes, but still a ride less than an hour – could not be had for less than E11, even in advance, and even on non-high-speed trains. I suppose there are differences in financial structures and support than impact that, but train travel in Spain was simply not as attractive as it had been in Italy in the past.

Above: walking to the Cordoba train station.

As I mentioned in the last post, I didn’t actually commit to renting a car for the second part of the trip until a couple of days before the moment arrived. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, although I’d driven in other countries before, and one stop in the last part of our trip would necessitate a car, absolutely. But still, I would have occasional seizures of hesitancy, and scramble around Google Maps, trying to figure if there were other destinations we could explore that were more friendly to train travel. There might have been, but it would have required me re-arranging my brain – and some of the destinations (like Guadalupe) would have been incredibly complicated to visit if we’d not had a car.

So…a car it was. Rented from Hertz, through the Hertz site. About $200 for ten days, pickup in one city, dropoff in another, much insurance paid for plus insurance through my Amex card.

I am extremely wary of 3rd-party sites when it comes to things like car rentals in foreign countries. Having that extra layer of responsible parties just might mean adding one more party who doesn’t want to help you when things go wrong, handing you back to the party in the previous layer…who would also like to not bother with you, and hands you back.

I read a lot of travel disaster stories and a great many of them involve aspects of travel booked through third-party sites, it seems to me.

International Driver’s License obtained through AAA, as you’re told to do – pay $20, get a form that you can show cops. There’s all sorts of conflicting information out there as to whether it’s required in various countries. All I can say is – the rental agency never asked for it at any point, and since I wasn’t stopped at any point, I don’t know if la policia would have actually asked to see it, rather than just my US state license.

I picked up the car in Seville, at the train station. I could have done so at the airport, but I wasn’t going to the airport, the airport was farther away, and my son and his family were going to the train station anyway on Saturday, so why not? The reason some warn against picking up a car at the train station rather than the airport has to do with traffic for the driver new to driving in Spain – the airport’s further away from the city, of course. But the train station is very near a highway, it was a Saturday, so there wasn’t much traffic – it was fine.

In fact, being introduced to driving in Spain on a weekend was an unintentionally excellent idea. I recommend it. I drove through and out of Seville, up to Merida, then to Caceres, and the next day to Trujillo and back to Caceres, going through the towns, parking in the middle of the towns – with no problems or issues, simply because it was a weekend and traffic was so light.

There were only two points during those ten days in which I felt a little harried behind the wheel – the first was in Talavera de la Reine – our stop on the way to Toledo. It was the middle of a weekday, everyone was out, and I found myself in the midst of traffic I hadn’t expected. I wasn’t keen on driving around in that and found parking as soon as I could, perhaps further away from the Basilica than needed, but at least I was off the road and away from all those other drivers, impatiently tailing me around roundabouts. The second was Tuesday in Bilbao – it was okay, but getting out of town at the end of our day there was a little tense, simply because it was around 5pm on a weekday. Only almost mowed over a couple of pedestrians.

Other than that, most of my driving was on highways – motorways – as the GPS lady called them. My experience driving these roads was similar to what it had been in France – very relaxing, and for the same reason, I think. The speed limit for cars is 120 km/hour (about 75 mph). I don’t know if it is the same for trucks, but I don’t think it is, because they all seemed to be going at least 15-20 km/slower and they stuck to it. Trucks don’t pass cars on these highways – they generally seem to stick in the left lanes. So with that absence of barreling semis and no billboards to speak of (sorry, Shunnarah!), you have a much calmer driving landscape.

Trujillo in the distance.

And roundabouts? As I’ve mentioned, I’m a fan. Once you get the hang of it and understand the yielding and that if you are exiting soon, you should hang right as soon as you can – they’re great. I particularly like them because they offer a more tolerant approach to mistakes and changes of mind. You miss your turn? Just drive around again, and there you are. Very…European.

The only thing I didn’t like and really didn’t understand was the way directional arrows – really just triangles – are painted on Spanish roads. I can’t find an image online of one, and I didn’t photograph it – because obviously, we’d be in the car when we saw it, but picture this:

In the lane you’re driving in, you are approaching a triangle painted in your lane indicated the proper direction traffic should be flowing. Imagine what this might look like – perhaps, if you’re imagining it, you’re envisioning being in your car and seeing the triangle painted on the road, with a side facing you and one of the vertices pointing away from you. Like an arrow.

But no.

It’s the opposite. For some reason, they do the opposite – a flat side facing away from you indicates the direction of traffic with the vertex pointing at you. I can’t tell you how many times I would get mildly, momentarily freaked out when glancing down and seeing that triangle pointing at me and my car. Am I going the right way?! Yes, my navigator would assure me. Yes, yes. Or, as the Spanish would say, si-si-si.

I encountered a few toll roads I wasn’t expecting and wasn’t prepared for, but luckily had enough change for or by accident and happenstance got into a lane that took cards, so no disasters there. I stuck to the speed limit, so I don’t think I got a ticket, although in Spain, they don’t seem to have the law patrolling for speeders, but instead use some sort of Super Secreto Radar, and you think you’re fine when surprise – a traffic ticket turns up in your mailbox a few weeks later.

And, finally, parking. That, rather than the challenges of driving, was the real reason I considered alternatives to driving. I was just really concerned about parking the car in these old towns designed for horsecarts, not cars. Where would I park? How would I know where to park? Would I have to parallel park on narrow stone roads?? That was a needless worry – and I didn’t have to go to the lengths I did to find “HOTEL WITH PARKING PROVIDED” either. Lesson really learned there – for of course, all of these towns are crazy to drive in, no one really wants to drive in them, and the towns don’t want to be clogged with cars either, so of course, there is plenty of parking available in lots right outside the centers, within easy walking distance of anything you’d want to stay, and even hotels.

One of the parking garage companies – I encountered this in a couple of places – has the tickets (we think) jerryrigged with chips or something so that after you pay, you don’t even have to insert it or even make contact with a machine before the barrier arm lifts – it just. There may be something else going on – perhaps an attendant has been watching via camera and knows you paid and raises the arm? But whatever the case, it was efficient and impressive.

Conclusion: I’m glad I rented the car. We were able to see things we would have missed if we’d traveled by bus or train. No way we could have reached Guadalupe as easily as we did, or made the out-of-the way stops we did with as much efficiency. Costwise, it just might have been a wash. If we’d just gone to major sites, even as expensive as train travel is in Spain, when you throw in the cost of parking and gas, I’m thinking it would have been about the same for the three of us. Hard to say, though. Either way, you see things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Left to right: Underground parking in Talavera de la Reine; free parking lot a few hundred meters from our inn in Guadalupe; parking garage outside the old city of Caceres, a ten minute walk from our hotel.

Two spots where a slightly larger car came in handy – driving up the dirt switchbacks leading up to the castle on the left, south of Toledo, and then taking the hard way up a very rocky road to this overlook and then down a dirt path – instead of the slightly easier way involving only rural dirt roads and no straight uphill path of rocks – to the Sad Hill Cemetery.

I’m going to do a recap of our trip, partly for you, but mostly for me. If you’ve ever taken an intense trip like this, you know how weird it is, how time compresses, how the moments you are convinced you won’t forget immediately fade into the fog of memory.

As I usually do, I’ll start with the basics. I’ll outline our itinerary in this post, including how we got around, then follow up with a post on where we stayed, then follow that up with several more detailed posts on what we experienced.

So..why Spain?

I have no Spanish blood in me (WASP on one side, French-Canadian on the other). Son #5 has a strong interest in Hispanic-related things, but from this side of the world: Mexico and Central America.

But. I do find Spain an interesting place – well, everywhere in the world is interesting to me, so that’s not helpful. I wanted a fresh destination for us and one that was easy to get to, closer to the US than say, Poland, and that would be a good spot for not only us, but for one of my older sons and his family (wife and son), who would be joining us for the first part of the trip.

So what evolved was a Seville-centered trip for the first two weeks, and then the three of us exploring for the rest of it. I had a general sense of what we’d do – ending up in Bilbao for a flight out, but I left it basically open until we were actually in Spain. I made some refundable hotel/hostel reservations, but I didn’t make the final decisions until we were actually there, and that included renting a car.

It turned out, I think, to be an excellent choice. For me at least! The one negative was the weather – as you know, Europe was in the midst of an intense heat wave during the last part of June and although almost everywhere we went had air conditioning, it made walking about outdoors not the most pleasant of experiences – in Bilbao, the temperatures were in the 70’s, and it was…lovely!

Anyway, here’s a map of our travels, followed by a day-by-day breakdown.

June 10: Fly out of the US

June 11: Arrive, eventually, in Seville, late afternoon.

June 12: Son #2 & family arrive

June 11-June 22 Seville. One day trip for us &grandson to Cordoba. One two-day trip for Son & Daughter-in-law to Grenada

June 22: Son #2 & family back to US.

June 22: Pick up rental car at Seville train station. Drive to Mérida for the afternoon and then to Cáceres‎

June 22-24 (morning): Cáceres‎ with Sunday afternoon trip to Trujillo.

And how did we get around? In Seville, we walked, with a couple of cab and bus rides here and there. We took the train to Cordoba. Son and DIL took the bus to Grenada.

After Seville, we drove. I’ll probably do a post on driving in Spain later, but just know that it was absolutely fine. Even navigating in towns and cities, while a little fraught, was problem-free. I have driven in Europe before – in Sicily in 2009,throughout France in 2012, then in Italy in 2016 – so, for example, the whole concept of the roundabout is familiar to me, and I really am a fan.

The car was a Citroen Cactus,rented from Hertz for about $200 for the 11 days – very cheap, it seems, especially with pickup and dropoff in two different cities. I usually go super small (last time in Italy, I drove a small Fiat and it was great fun), but I knew this time we’d be driving on some questionable roads (to get to Sad Hill Cemetery) and a small car was…not advisable for that. It drove very well, and came with GPS, which I’ve never had in a car before, but was invaluable this time.

Well, I started this about 5:30 AM – I’ve been awake since 4, with my body still on Europe clock – and I expect others to start awakening soon, so…more later on exactly where we stayed and what all that was like.